The Hill Times
TORONTO—How has Prime Minister Mark Carney performed? Brilliantly, and I’m not a partisan. He has been bold, determined, visionary, and in tune with current public sentiment. He is less concerned about being “politically correct” than with producing results.
A novice politician, his campaign for the Liberal leadership and in the April election demonstrated an impressive capacity for retail politics. He has handled United States President Donald Trump with aplomb. Other world leaders respect him and he projects self-assurance. Trump, China’s Xi Jinping, and India’s Narendra Modi treat Carney seriously, unlike their treatment of Justin Trudeau. To be sure, Carney’s record to date has had blemishes. He did not reprimand, demote, or dismiss public safety minister Gary Anandasangaree for lobbying immigration officials to admit a confessed Tamil Tiger terrorist into Canada. Anandasangaree did this as a backbencher, but he misled the public about it while in cabinet. Carney also did not dismiss Liberal party activists who smeared the Conservatives during the election campaign by scattering Trumpian “Stop the Steal” buttons at a Conservative conclave; he merely “reassigned” them. Carney has an oversized cabinet, too many departments, and too many parliamentary secretaries . Trudeau had fewer. Many ministries are redundant and should disappear. Do we need a minister of jobs and families, as well as a minister of women and gender equality, especially since Trudeau’s “feminist foreign policy” has been discarded? Do we need a minister of Crown-Indigenous relations and a separate minister of Indigenous services? Redundancy is inconsistent with Carney’s objective of trimming bureaucracy. The cabinet is oversized because Carney must keep his caucus members occupied. Other prime ministers have also had bloated cabinets. Opposition MPs can rise in the House to self-righteously attack the government; government backbenchers can’t criticize the government, and in recent decades can’t even offer constructive suggestions outside the confines of caucus. All they can do is hope to get elevated to a more prestigious job and its perks. Being a government backbencher is the worst job an MP can have. Step back, however, and look at the big picture of Carney’s accomplishments. It deserves an A grade. The economy has performed better than anticipated. His Major Projects Office is accelerating economic development. International investors are interested in Canada again. He has quieted Alberta’s government on energy policy without provoking Quebec. He has weakened his parliamentary opponents by luring one of their MPs into his caucus. History suggests that Carney’s minority government could last until 2029. That would mark a successful tenure even though his Liberals may well lose the next election. Trudeau’s last minority government also lasted four years. Then-Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper’s 2008 government could have done so, as well, had he not dissolved Parliament. A distinctively Canadian parliamentary culture has evolved, making Canada an outlier in the Western world. Think of Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Israel, New Zealand, Italy, etc., where majority coalition governments are almost always formed after the leading party wins a plurality of seats. In Canada, by contrast, minority governments have become the norm, not the exception. Of the nine federal elections in this century, six have produced minority governments. These governments carried on without seeking coalition partners. Three elections since the late 1950s were triggered by governing parties opportunistically seeking to convert their minority into a majority: 1958, 1965, 2008. The current Parliament is the 45th, yet only six have been ended by confidence votes, reinforcing the likelihood that Carney’s government has staying power. Parliamentary culture is now driven by a “pass-the-baton” norm. There will be dozens of confidence votes before the next election. When they happen, if history is a guide, one party or another will rise or abstain to ensure that Parliament is not dissolved. The NDP did so most recently in the vote on the budget, but in some future votes the Conservatives will seize the baton, and in others the Bloc Québécois will do so. That is what happened during Trudeau’s two minority governments. The Conservatives and the Bloc will use their majorities on parliamentary committees to try tarnishing the image of Carney and his government. The ethics committee is doing that now, pursuing imaginary conflict of interest violations on Carney’s part. It’s a wild-goose chase which will go nowhere. He has been meticulously careful to avoid any appearance of conflict, and his honeymoon with the public continues. The truculence of the Conservatives and Leader Pierre Poilievre is not working. What would work is a major scandal. Trudeau survived the 2019 SNC Lavalin debacle because he had a majority. Then-Liberal prime minister Paul Martin’s minority government did not survive the sponsorship scandal and, most crucially, the RCMP’s mid-election campaign announcement of an investigation of a cabinet budget leak. The Conservatives can only hope for a similar gift. Nelson Wiseman is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Toronto. The Hill Times
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